December is here and that means that Santa Claus is putting the final touches on his list and checking it twice. For the seventh year, Cisco is teaming up with hospitals across the Americas to provide children who are hospitalized during the holidays the opportunity to show Santa what good little boys and girls they’ve been (and let him know what tops their wish list). From Canada, down to the United States and Latin America, Santa will virtually visit hospitals from his post at the North Pole, making cyber-stops by way of the magic of the latest mobile and collaboration technologies.

Santa Visits Hospitalized Children (photo courtesy of American Family Children’s Hospital)

Approximately 50 hospitals throughout the Americas, with the help of Cisco and our partners, will bring a live feed of the North Pole to their patients – using either an iPad, or a video monitor and web-enabled camera. Santa will visit with children in the hospital’s playroom, and for those who don’t feel well enough to leave their room, a mobile cart or iPad enabled with Cisco Jabber® software will help Santa travel for a bedside visit.

Much like children who are able to sit on Santa’s lap, patients will have the opportunity to pass along their wishes this holiday season in plenty of time for St. Nick to make his list and check it twice.

Cisco is proud to be able to touch the lives of these children with the hope and happiness of a personalized visit with Santa using Cisco technologies. View the full list of hospitals that are participating in the 2013 Cisco Santa Connection Program.

Galloping technological change, encouraging economics, new partnerships, and rising consumer acceptance together poise telemedicine for widespread global adoption, according to Cisco and other experts at the 17th American Telemedicine Association meeting this week in San Jose.
“These next couple of years, I think, are critical,” said Dr. Danny Sands, Cisco Director of Medical Informatics. “I think this is the time. This is our time.” Read More »

Cisco Systems is announcing a next-generation solution to address an increasingly complex and common challenge in healthcare settings: the need to assure high security and patient privacy, while enabling fast, role-appropriate clinical data access for providers, with seamless connectivity across a diverse array of (mobile?) devices – all at once.

The new Cisco offering is dubbed Beyond BYOD – “BYOD” standing for “Bring Your Own Device.” It enables a healthcare organization to set up and administer secure, unified, any-device access across its entire network – including wireless, wireless LAN, cellular and VPN elements.

Healthcare information infrastructure has been challenged in recent years by an increasingly distributed healthcare delivery model, the rise of electronic patient records and privacy concerns, and the explosion of mobile devices entering hospital networks. Physicians and healthcare staff are driving demand for immediate provisioning of their personal devices from smartphones, to tablets, and notebooks for use in the workplace and integration into the clinical workflow. Indeed, there are over 4000 applications specifically dedicated to the healthcare industry and a Forrester study found 41 percent of personal devices are used to access business applications. Doctors, administrators, patients and their families all have rationales for accessing an information system – and each is likely to bring a unique device profile. Preference for their own personalized hardware over standardized, workplace-issued devices combined with the inherent need by medical professionals for anytime, anywhere connectivity – challenges network solution providers to keep up by offering true borderless networks: secure systems that are easy to use and accept all kinds of connection-ready hardware.

Beyond BYOD from Cisco answers the call by delivering healthcare providers, patients and visitors access from any device in any healthcare space, a unified policy across the network, an uncompromised user experience, and simplified IT operations.

The BYOD challenge has confronted IT managers in the healthcare sector for some time, but Beyond BYOD goes beyond simple device acceptance. Cisco has taken a new, holistic approach to managing borderless networks. The result is a top-down, comprehensive approach that can deliver a high-quality experience while allowing management of complexity and scale for healthcare organizations of all sizes – not just the large-scale enterprise.

Beyond BYOD features:

A new “Identity Services Engine” (ISE) that helps users introduce personal devices to a workplace network and configure an appropriate access level without hands-on assistance from IT.

A new, scalable approach to WLAN infrastructure that supports rich media sharing. It’s IPv6-optimized for seamless roaming without drops and enhanced security. IPv6 compatibility is critical to next-generation BYOD strategy: Cisco VNI predicts 71 percent of smartphones and tablets – 1.6 billion in total – will be IPv6-capable by 2016.

The PPACA known as Healthcare Reform Act in the United States is driving major change in our industry around accountability for the quality outcome of our care. It is making providers accountable for the care that is delivered with measures that will be reported by patients. As I monitor these major changes, it makes me wonder how we can really implement the critically needed change. I wonder, why is the US dead last compared to 6 other leading free world nations” in healthcare quality measures and we spend almost double per capita for healthcare than other countries according to the Commonwealth Fund (June, 2010). Many believe the concepts that have been embraced by the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) under the direction of Dr. Don Berwick, (appointed on July 7, 2010 by President Barack Obama to serve as the Administrator of the CMS) can drive change. As CMS is the largest healthcare payer in the US, (over half), they can lead a major change of this nature and have adopted the “Triple-Aim” model of evidenced based care and wellness. The aspiration goals, or the Triple Aim, is a phrase coined by Dr. Berwick and it is all about focusing on how to drive improvement so that our populations are healthier, our patients receive better care and instead of working within a volume based business model, move to one of quality and value that rewards prevention, wellness and a positive patient experience.

How can Cisco influence and enable this within our Healthcare Ecosystem?

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